Malice
by xheartmehorrid
Summary: Naraku ponders the demise of his favorite preistess. [NarxKik] Love and Hatred.


disclaimer: i don't own inuyasha the manga or anime, fools. i don't even know why i'm still doing these. bwahahaha. but i do own THIS. - aka THE STORY cough. so enjoy, ladies and gents. oh and HEDPE LYRICS ANYONE?! please and thanks.

_Give us what we want now. _

She was pressed perfection borne of immortal love, eternal hate, perfect discretion. If circumstance was the culprit and not fate, then chance had damned him and thrown karma in his face by re-creating her. But in the sacred web of souls, where every life was somehow intertwined by some unknown and binding force, by some seemingly random succession of events, the fragile strings of fate were tied and he and she were hideously bound for all eternity.

Her life on earth had been a brief existence steeped in tragedy - she was delicate, young and innocent, and her mortal heart yearned for the capacity to love granted to every normal woman. Yet she was enslaved to the solitary occupation of a Shinto preistess. A stoic and unrewarding life, which presented her, of course, the constant opportunity to care for and dote on others as was her natural inclination, but still denied her all the happiness and companionship of a normal human life. The villagers adored her and they sung her praises. She had a smaller sister in those times, who was utterly enthralled with her, and eagerly mimicked her every action. She was a spectacular creature, beautiful and resilient, who possessed extraordinary powers of purification. She was, as well, a master archer, and in her short years of living she had felled many an intimidating foe.

But this was done out of duty and devotion, and her soul greedily hungered for a very different sustenance.

It was, perhaps, this particular set of characteristics that landed her the position which would doom her. That is, the Shikon Jewel, the Sacred Jewel of Four Souls, was placed solely under her protection, for she in those times was the only creature worthy of possessing and thus, guarding it. This is where their paths were first to cross. He, in those same times, was trapped and damned mortal, rendered physically useless after a life of crime and horror as a bandit had left him injured. He had been hideously burned, and the fact that he had survived the wound alone proved that fate had a way of preserving extraordinary evil. He was the preistess Kikyou's charge.

She cared for him night and day; a quiet, doting, and infinitely patient savior. The terrific timid curve of her lips which moved in stiff sequence to form her words, unravelled her voice like a perfect scroll, while all the while he watched her put on the unfeeling saintly smile which reeked with falsehood. She was a woman sublimely sad, incredibly isolated. And one by one her shaking breaths that caused the sweat to furrow on his brow. He almost felt that he could will himself to move, in those instances. In those undisturbed hours of silent solitude, broken only by the occasional utterance. Some caring reminder, some tenderly applied antidote. A phrase. A whisper. Anything. Nothing. He felt that he wanted her bad enough that he could somehow find the strength to lift himself up from that stinking place. But he remained immobile and incapable; and his frusteration mounted every day. He continued to watch her, fixing her with looks of tireless longing as she tended to his wounds.

His lusting gaze roved the milky and endless flesh, ravaged the untouched flow of purity that bled from every pore. Dark thoughts flooded his mind and passed like dark clouds over his sight, blurring one fury into the next til everything within him was demolished by the unholy fever, became his all-consuming desire to make the preistess his. It was a laughable notion. And he fell into a giddy, maddening despair as he realized he was losing her to the half-demon, Inuyasha. It was because of all of these things that he sold his soul for her. He sacrificed his dark heart, his pitiful, broken body to the demons.

He became Naraku, flawless evil sculped by hatred and deception. He was beautiful, powerful, and without regret. He was equipped with a clever, scheming mind; the only muscle in him which worked harder than Onigumo's human heart. With this newly discovered mind, he carefully built the foundation for Kikyou's demise. He surpressed his human side's desire to attain her, and exterminated her_ and _her lover instead. He sent her soul to Hell where it belonged. Unforuntately, she took the Jewel, the prized possession, with her to the grave. Both were lost in the abyss. He gave up hope of ever having it.

He was nearly shocked at her silence and repose, in death. The otherworldly calm with which she damned her hanyou lover and slipped gracefully into eternal sleep, cremated along with the item she protected. It was unlike her, and did not become her. But painting his hands with her blood was just the first of his many successes. And he would make many more miserable before Kikyou was finally returned to him. After 50 years, as though her defeat had been as temporary as falling rain. But death had changed her. She had transformed much as he had. Her body, sustained by the souls of dead maidens, was free to love and hate as it never before had been, and was bound only to the world of the living by its own will and the resentment that spurred it; tied down, at last, by no other earthly whim.

She was literally a ghost from the past - come back to haunt him and all those whom she affected. However, it was her hatred which surprised him most. And, at last, he was delighted by the fact that she had not come to reclaim the lover he had turned against her all those years ago - but to destroy him! And his companion from across time, the reincarnation, Kagome, along with all their friends.

Unsurprisingly, the duplicate was not the original, and though they were physically replicas, the two - Kagome and Kikyou - were nothing alike. The hanyou was drawn to the skinny schoolgirl for reasons all his own, and vice versa; though the pitiful pair insisted on playing foolish games in order to avoid the fact, hindering them both in battle by making them vulnerable. But this was all obvious to Kikyou, who, with her own hidden agenda and continued bout of antics, left him reeling and infuriated to no end with every sudden and unexpected move. He as much wanted to murder as obtain her, and she became his obsession for a second time. Damn her - and he tried and failed to break her.

He was not blind to her motives; yet she feigned allegiance and decided to bequeath him her share of the Sacred Jewel. He accepted. Her ploy was, after all, to his advantage. But it was Kikyou, her mere presence, again, which forced him to act. He literally_ could not _stomach Onigumo's heart any longer. It clawed at him, taunted him, filled him unceasingly with rage. It put a barrier between him and his ultimate objective. And so, he quietly and cleverly disposed of it. It was entertaining to watch Inuyasha and his crew be thrown hopelessly off his trail for a short while. Desperate in their attempts to find him, reveal him and defeat him. But most of all, he took pleasure in watching - with surpreme delight, with superb satisfaction - the miko's illusion of a body be rendered to pieces before he quaintly hurled her into a frothing chasm of his own miasma.

The hanyou was tragically too late to save her from this. The re-united lovers had walked the earth together for a second time, had been given an unexpected second chance by fate, and yet the half-demon had been so distracted by the mere copy of the woman he once loved that he failed to protect her a second time. Their turmoil was delicious. Inuyasha's surpreme sadness, his overwhelming guilt, it was exquisite. But his satisfaction was, unfortunately, quite short-lived. He seethed. How could he know that Kikyou was his curse through everything? No matter how many times he fooled himself into believing he had finally gotten rid of her. How could he imagine that she would keep returning from the dead only to thwart him?

Perhaps her soul alone in the abyss of hell, filled with damned souls, was strong enough to forego rebirth time and time again, if only in order to fulfill her final mission. His destruction: which would destroy her, too, if followed through to completion. Could it be fate's wretched punishment for him, the true incarnate source of evil, to be hounded again and again by the living, breathing image of the sacred? Though she was as tainted as he was, now, as riddled as he had been once with all sorts of wicked human emotions which seethed and writhed within her as her soul-collectors in the air. She was not the same as she had been, when she was still alive. She now could _hate. _Freely hate. She could hate enough to return to the world, time after time, no matter how many times he believed he had been able to stop her. It was maddening.

She claimed her aim as vengeance for the wrong that had been done to her so long ago. She made it out that completion, and thus, her end would come only when he had been obliterated, and Inuyasha's soul was drug down with hers to the bowels of the abyss. Somewhere along the way, he discovered that she had become hopelessly estranged from her desire for the latter - and found will and reason only in her wish for his own death to come.

"Why do you hate me so, Kikyou?" He purred, watching her, as always, through Kanna's eerie mirror. This time, his observations lacked the passion which had accompanied them when Onigumo's heart had still resided in his body. However, curiousity clung like a leech, as steadfastly as ever. Her essence that clawed its way under his skin and remained there. She was so persisent, Kikyou. Such a wretched thing. He had stolen love from her; life; happiness; absolution; and finally, he had stolen her ability to find peace in the afterlife. He had robbed her of any semblance of companionship or solace. He had filled her entire being with the stench of his malice. He had made himself the sole objective of her existence at last.

Finally, the woman he had come to comprehend and then condemn, desire and destroy, understand and undermine. She was his everything, in that sense. Despite all the ploys he'd carried out, all the havoc he had wreaked, and all the bitter enemies he'd made. His one objective through it all had been _her. _ And now he'd taken everything from her.

She deserved, in every respect, the vengeance he would never let her have. Yet, in due time, he would tear that from her too - the righteous ending to her tragic story. He would never let her rejoin Inuyasha in death, or in life. Though the half-breed had abandoned her already for the reincarnation. He would never let her carry out the last whim of her body which would stop at nothing. He could almost feel her as he eyed her on the surface of the glass - still, lips barely moving, her breath hanging like flowing ink as it twisted, was calligraphy in the air. Her fingers flexed on the taut curve of her favorite weapon. The arrows which glowed with a pungent aura of holiness, even after all the monstrosities her soul had endured. How a woman who thrived off the stolen souls of girls and women, whose one priority in the world of the living was to carry out a mission of death, could remain pure was beyond him. Her concentration, as usual, was flawless, and bordered on meditation. Her brows knit, and furrowed. What could be going on in that mind of hers?

Coy as ever, wrought with one passing thought, then the next, and all involving him and her mission, he knew. _He hoped. _What could it be that drew him to her so objectively throughout the ages? Though he watched her now without desire and without any feeling which even began to _resemble _mortal longing. What kept his gaze on her, slow, unblinking every minute of the hour that he was not occupied with something of more importance? Somehow, she constantly managed to draw on his attention, without making any effort whatsoever to do so. He could not presume to know the answers to these nagging questions, though it infuriated him that he, who could access any knowledge in the worlds both physical and spiritual, could not seem to learn this single, insignificant thing. _Her_ thoughts.

It was a singular rage that plunged itself to the depths of his stomach, tied the knot and twisted. He grimaced. And though he lacked the feelings associated with her which had once resided in his discarded human heart, the one thing he did not need a human heart to feel was _hate. _ And he hated her, the reek of her, that filled his lungs and throat. He wanted to _kill her _. He wanted her gone. Immediately. He could not go on watching her. He could not have a moment's satisfaction, knowing she was still alive. As much of a hoax as her existence was. He _despised _her for remaining - after his second attempt already to destroy her.

He dashed her reflection in the mirror in an instant. Kanna stepped back silently and without any acknowledgement of her master's expression or regard for her surroundings, her pale image dispersed by the darkness from whence she came. He wrung his hands. He pondered. He mused. He could have laughed. He _almost_ laughed. He thought of ending the preistess - a fancy which occurred to him frequently, though fleetingly, but it was lackluster and humorless. He thought of what possible devil could lie behind the impenetrable surface; disappointed only in that the more likely factor seemed to be that _nothing_ lay whatsoever beyond it. She was an empty shell, suffused with a tormented spirit, sustained by her desire to kill. The stiff, unmoving mouth, the dash of blood spraying the cloth and flesh of her, the perfect arch of her weapon and her brow. Her throat twisted in rage. Her hands which struggled to move faster than her dark and darting eyes. _Perhaps there was nothing else. _Perhaps no love lingered in the bones sculpted from dirt. Perhaps no sadness, no regret still clung to the flaxen strands of hair.

"We are not so different, you and I," he noted aloud in the empty room. Now this was truly an amusing thought! That he, who had just discarded the last of whatever could have been called his humanity, was just as empty and unfulfilled and, at last, as powerful as she was. Ah, but he was infinitely more powerful. And this, this was why _he_ would crush _her_, and again and again watch her die crouched under the shadow of his palm, while she made no move to so much as plead for the pathetic remnant of her life. But what if she still did feel? What if she did regret that the strings of fate remained to strangle her, no matter how many times her form was regenerated? What if she did resent? Tumultuous enigma. Formidable enemy. Pathetic pawn. Disgrace. An utter waste. A shell of what she had been once, a clay pot housing the strengh and useless memories of a woman 50 years buried. She was nothing more or less than this! A ghost, a monster, a flickering memory renewed from a time long passed. Struggling to maintain even a spark of life within her delicate, hollow form. She had no purpose. She was _nothing._

And yet, who could he say on this earth was more important to him? There was no other who compared. All others paled. _He_ paled, sneered at the irony of the thought. To hold the one he loathed the most in such high regard. But then, if anyone had the ability to hurt him, it was her. Luckily, he was coming for her - and she would not have much time left anyway. He would not let her live. He never would. But til he finally disposed of her, til she met the end from which she could and would not be able to return -

he would make it so that while she lived, she lived only for him. He did not lust for her, he did not want her, he did not desire her, and he would retch to think he ever could have _loved_ her, even when he, too, was still a mortal man. He had been a villain, after all. Even then. And love - pure love - was simply beyond the grasp of beings such as he.

But he did want to her to be his, as he was hers. In that he lived because she had lived once, died for her once, and lived again to hunt her and annihilate her and attain her, if only in battle and in watching with surpreme delight her endless suffering. He would take so much pleasure in her demise. _In the end, she does, she _ will, _belong to me. _He would break her in half! Fuck her soul in effigy and cast it aside. The only one worthy of her, really. Damned with her forever in eternity. Kikyou. His Kikyou. His.

The two of them alone perhaps recognized the darkness and frailty of life. The value of power, hatred, and manipulation. She was strong. She was cold. She was impenetrable. She was determined. She was filled with rage. As was he. She, like him, acknowledged the cruelness of fate. But she, unlike him, could be shattered. She was more human - even in death - than alive _or _dead he would _ever_ be, and her humanity this time - just like the first time - would be her downfall.

He saw the way she wandered from village to village, tending to the sick and the ailing. The manner in which she continued to occasionally stumble across the path of Inuyasha and his friends, refusing their assistance, brushing them off with cold indifference - but at the same time, warning them in her subtle and serious way, siding with them due to their mutual objective. Their great enemy: him. Kikyou and Inuyasha would collaborate, talk together, while the schoolgirl's hands trembled with jealousy, and tears stood in her eyes. It was a situation which continued to arouse questions. Did the half-breed still love the preistess that he had pleged his life to protect, but failed to protect time after time? Did he still love the woman he would have become a weak, pathetic _mortal _for, but 50 years ago? The woman he'd embraced, once. The woman he had touched. Undyingly loved. The half-breed cared nothing for her now. He saw her differently. Their devotion to eachother in another lifetime, and the pain they had endured when they had been so violently pitted against eachother, grew increasingly insignificant in the heart and mind of Inuyasha. These things reached Kikyou, he knew, he could tell, he could _feel _. And as much distance as Kikyou put between herself and the past, he knew that he could still use it against her. Her human heart hated. But it still had the capacity to love. And he would ruin her with it. But was it truth? Was their bond totally dispersed? Or did the two, despite the presence of the human girl, still feel for one another? Could they have not totally forgotten, despite appearances? He would not let it be so.

Her efforts would be beautifully futile - he would construct, for her, the most cruel and twisted misery. The woman for whom, as a human, he had desired happiness; he would now sculpt deception and violation, battle after exhausting battle, just like the first time he had ruined her. Rendering her open, though time and time again he saw she could no longer bleed. He'd continue to find methods of destroying her until her body had no strength left to revive itself. She was stronger than the rest of them, in that respect. In that her power and resolve was so immense that she could escape the greedy clutches of death itself. Stronger than the incarnation which had inherited half of her soul, and the sum of her powers. Stronger than the pathetic half-demon she had pledged innocent, faulty allegiance to in another life. She was, indeed, becoming an irritant and a threat. He'd do away with her, yes. But he wanted to toy with her! He wanted to enjoy her!

He, Naraku, loathed the preistess - but he was infinitely amused with her. He'd break her. He'd have her broken in half. And he would laugh! Because he would find so much satisfaction in watching her go. He had heaved up at last the heart that 'loved' her, and transformed it into something, or some_one_, utterly sinister; giving him, at last, the final greatest advantage over her, and the only one he'd ever need. Which was, in all simplicity, the capacity to be indifferent to her suffering. The ability to lay a hand on her. Choke the life out of her. But she was already dead; a waste of force and time that gobbled up the air and expended useless space. Wasting away on her own hatred and bitterness. Which was - and he trembled at the thought of this - _only _ for him. If, of course, he could get the loathsome _hanyou _and his bothersome coterieout of the way.

The veins that feigned to push against the confines of her skin, the way the muscles in her throat moved in the light to form the words and phrases written and coyly scripted on her lips. Her tight, pressed smile like a paper crease. She was empty. She was a fake. She was made immortal in his mind by the simple hated fact that he could not forget her. He would rape her of everything. He would be her downfall - the last dutiful representative of fate. Her destiny. Her doom. And they would belong to eachother then, as it always was, and should have been. Bound together irrevocably, choked by the knotted strings of fate which showed no mercy to her plight and plunged her into deeper despair, life after life - and hurled her into his waiting embrace, life after life. To hold and hate; to mold, shape, and break her. His kikyou. Forever. His, and_ only _his.

Naraku brushed the hair out of his eyes, allowed himself a gruesome smile. He could imagine the yielding vertebrae, the snapping marvelous limbs, the incalculable tangle of souls struggling to escape her as the light drained from her eyes. Her horrid flesh being disposed of. Her wretched, awful expression. Would Inuyasha be miserable again? Or relieved, that he, too, no longer had to put up with this re-occurring phantom of the past. He could fancy her will, her resentment, her indignance as she shouted his name - "Naraku!" - and rained the flood of sacred arrows on his body. It wouldn't matter - he would never let her take hold of his heart, and destroy it. Whatever she did to his _present _form, it would be useless. He'd plunge his appendages through her chest, and watch her breathe her last, succumbing breath. He'd kiss her lips. He hated her, he hated her. But she was his. Always his. He would hold her for a second, suspended in the air - make her pledge her life to him before he ripped it from her. Beautiful, powerful, without regret. He'd let her fall against him. Retching. Heaving. Hopefully screaming. Letting her abhor him. And he would adore it.

The two of them, together, damned, forever.

_Give us what we want. _


End file.
